Sub Pop Records

Marram sez: I´m against the depersonalizing of listening to music. All these digital formats do not do any more than eliminate the... (on The Gutter Twins have a new EP! )
Jason sez: I jest. For you losers - Gone for Good by The Shins For all others - I'm putting my money on... (on A Form of Paying Attention February 2010 )
Jason sez: Archive this shit, SP! (on Pandering to the Locals January '08 )
Jason sez: liquid utopian vision liquid utopian vulva liquid utopian vagina liquid utopian venereal liquid utopian vivacity You see where I'm going with this--I'm talking about love--l-u-v (on Pandering to the Locals January '08 )
nosferatu_d2 sez: I agree with Jeff and I want to get it too. Someone nicked my copy years ago. I used to... (on Sub Pop Invents the "mp3" )
jeremysexytime sez: Pencils In The Wind - Flight of the Conchords. So magical.. so meaningful.. the song of love.. (on A Form of Paying Attention February 2010 )

Fight Softly is the second album for Sub Pop by New Zealand’s pop masters The Ruby Suns. Ryan McPhun (their prime mover) has the kind of voracious musical mind that cites as equal influences ‘80s New Jack Swing and modern Angolan kuduro, Fleetwood Mac and Britney Spears, Brazilian tropicalia and Argentinean cumbia. He’s the kind of diligent, meticulous soul that spends days hunched over a laptop in a tiny rented studio in Auckland, NZ just to perfect a sequenced drum track (mission accomplished). And Fight Softly is the kind of head-spinning combination of big-picture vision and sumptuous detail that only comes from an artist with an urgent need to express all the stuff he’s seen. And you can dance to it!

California-born (and New Zealand citizen) McPhun took childhood trips to New Zealand and finally made Auckland home in 2003. Though he soon started playing with Kiwi indie darlings The Brunettes, he’d been making his own music for years—-four-track bedroom stuff that mixed his faraway vocals with effects-laden guitar, synths, and all manner of field-recorded samples. With his own new band, Ryan McPhun and The Ruby Suns, McPhun recorded and released his first album for NZ label Lil’ Chief Records. By the time its follow-up, Sea Lion, was ready the foreshortened Ruby Suns had gained a college following in New Zealand and toured Australia with :The Shins":http://www.subpop.com/artists/the_shins and the UK with Field Music, among others. The album came out on Sub Pop in early 2008 and landed on various best-of lists that year.

And for a few summer months The Ruby Suns landed in Seattle. There they played Sub Pop’s not-so-humble 20th anniversary festival and began work on ??Fight Softly…